The Purpose of Negative Emotions

Hello my friends and welcome back to the 10 Minute Mind Shift Podcast. 

You can listen on Apple Podcasts or read on…

My goal today is to give you a mind shift by giving you some bite sized knowledge nuggets that you can apply today and up level the results you want in any area of your life!

This is episode #14.

Today, we are going to talk about Negative Emotions…doesn’t that sounds like fun?

First of all, I am going to set the record straight…

There are no good emotions or bad emotions, good thoughts or bad thoughts.

There are only thoughts and emotions that serve you as you create the life of your heart’s desire or thoughts and emotions that do not serve you.

I used to think that because I had all of these negative thoughts and emotions that something was wrong with me.

I mean, I would see the evidence in the book stores with aisles and aisles of books devoted to “How to Be Happy.”

I read hundreds of them and none of them said what I am about to say to you…

We are supposed to have negative emotions!

Yep…

It is how we are designed and there is a purpose to them.

I hope that with what I just said right there that you will stop kicking your ass every time you have a bad day or a negative thought or emotion.

Just stop.

That my friend, does not serve you.

Here is the deal…We only know happy BECAUSE sad exists.  We know connection because lonely exists.

We know brave and courageous because fear exists.  We can only know what ability is because of experiencing inability.  We only know authentic because we know fake.  We know energized because we know …you get my point.

Negative emotions ARE what make positive emotions possible.

They ARE how we know what we DON’T want to experience.  When we know what we don’t want, then we can better pursuit what we DO want.

The human experience is 50/50.  This is normal and when we understand that, it starts for feel more like 60/40 or 80/20.

When we don’t understand that, the very human experience of 50/50 sends into a downward spiral and into those useless and powerless Indulgent emotions that I talked about in episode #10.

The worry, anxiety, self-doubt, self-pity, confusion, indecision and resentment just to name a few.

Here is what I want you to understand about a negative emotion…it’s harmless.

What?

They don’t feel comfortable, but they do not cause pain.

And why this is so important to understand is that avoiding the experience of a negative emotion is what drives us to do things we shouldn’t life over eat, over drinking, over spend, date people we shouldn’t, marry people we shouldn’t, stay married to people we shouldn’t.

The prospect of feeling a negative emotion is what keeps us from doing the very things that we can’t stop thinking about, whatever that is for you.

It’s your brains way of keeping you from feeling fear, being rejected and feeling the pain of humiliation.

Think about it…what are you not doing because of the way it might make you feel.  We work very hard at avoiding the feeling of failure and what we are also doing is missing the feeling of success in the process.

When I am working with my weight loss client, one of the things they tell me about why they are afraid to go into a program that might actually work is that they fear feeling deprived. 

They fear feeling the discomfort of the change that they know they will experience in order to growth.

They fear the isolation of being the only one at a party not over-eating.

They fear the disappointment of not eating the cookie.

Here is a mind shift for you…

You are going to feel all of those emotions whether you chase your dreams and create the life of your heart’s desire or not.

Why?

Because you are human and you have a brain and that is the way we are wired…all of us.

I know you feel like you are wired to even more of a negative bias than your friend.  It’s just not true.

You are just like I was before I invested in my own coaching.  When you learn how your brain works and how you can manage your brain to create different results…you begin to see the value of all of your emotions, even the negative ones and you learn how to flip the script and change the plot of your life instead of letting life just happen all around you.

My coach told me…” you might as well make the decision to step into the discomfort, embrace all of the emotions that are part of the human experience and know that your willingness to experience the beautiful existence of being human means that from time to time, that includes a negative emotion.”

No one gets an exemption from them or an opt out.  No one!

Nothing has gone wrong and you are not broken my friend, no matter how negative you feel like you are… AND you are in control of deciding exactly how you want to feel regardless of the circumstance.

I have an example but first I want to share this. 

We create our own suffering by resisting our emotions, by trying not to feel them but what if we just allowed them and embraced them and recognized it as part of our humanness.

Allowing an emotion is not the same as ignoring it, trying to spin into something positive and it is the opposite of resisting it.

Allowing is like swimming in pool of pool noodles and each pool noodle is an emotion.  We allow them to be in the pool with us, we let them float up and drift off.

What we have been doing is grabbing onto them and trying to push them under the water.  If you have ever tried to submerge a pool noodle, you know the impossibility of that.

If you push it down in the middle, the end pop up.  If you hold the ends under water, the middle pops up.

If we just allow the negative emotion to present itself without us making it mean anything negative about us as a human for having the negative emotion, we get better each time we go through the experience.

It doesn’t mean negative things don’t happen anymore, it means you are better equipped to go through them.

So here is an example of why you want your negative emotions.

A couple of years ago my little dog Bella started getting what I called swelly belly.  It would come and go like water retention.  At first I thought she was just aging, and gaining weight, losing her youth, kind of like us.

She had energy and was eating and drinking fine, so I didn’t think too much of it and then one day I thought, I will just take her in and make sure it’s not something more serious but I couldn’t imagine it was anything serious given how she was acting.

When the doctor came out of the exam room, he said, she has a tumor that is the size of her little body.  There is a 99% chance that it is septic, there is a 100% chance she will die during surgery if we remove it.  If we don’t do surgery, you might have a couple of weeks left with her and then we will need to put her down.

For those of you who have pets, you know what those words felt like when I heard them.

I felt like a punch to the gut.  I was scared for Bella, sad for Steve and I and ha a wave of all kinds of negative emotions.

Here is the deal.

Sadness was the emotion that I wanted to feel getting news like that.  I felt terribly sad at the prospect of losing my little dog.

Sadness had a purpose.  So did concern and curiosity.  Worry…not so much. 

Remember, worry is an indulgent emotion. 

Being sad and concerned crated curiosity about what our options were and what her chances were if it was not septic.  If I would have stayed in a state of worry, I would not have been useful in conveying the information to my husband.  I would have been useless making decisions.

I would have been frantic about the whole event.

So when bad things happen, we want the negative emotions available to us.  We want to be able to experience the event with the appropriate human emotion.

The story turned out to be amazing.  The vet had me say my good bye and he took her in to surgery and so while I was grieving I remember being very aware and conscious of the range of emotions I was accessing and allowing.

Now, the story has a happy ending.  Bella’s tumor was not septic and that little dog bounced back like nothing had ever happened.

Of course, I don’t wish anything like that on any one but here is the deal…I only know joy because I know sadness.

I want to give you some things that you can do that will help you allow your emotions.  It’s not easy and it takes practice, but it’s a total game changer to up leveling your life.

Step 1.  When you feel yourself in a negative emotion ask yourself these two questions…

1. What am I feeling?  Describe it specifically.
2. Where is it in my body?  Really sit in the space of feeling it in your being and your body.

Step 2.  Instead of ignoring it, resisting it or buffering against it…breathe it in.  Open your heart up to the emotion that you are feeling.  Here is what happened. When I was really feeling the sad and breathing it in, I felt the hollowness of my gut and the heaviness in my heart.  I could literally feel the vibrations in my body.

It wasn’t pleasant but resisting is way more painful and it is where we create our own suffering.  Instead of tightening up against I and bracing against it, the sadness just flowed through me and I felt a softening happen in my body too.  Kind of like an acceptance of whatever happens, I will be OK. 

Being unwilling to feel the negative emotions does not keep negative things from happening.  Things beyond our control are always going to come and go in our lives. 

Some of the events will create negative emotions and as it turns out…it’s supposed to be that way.

Here is my parting thought. 

When circumstances beyond my control create a negative emotion I ask myself, how do I want to feel about this, how do I want to show up for this experience.  Who do I want to be?

Bella’s event is a perfect example.  I wanted to be sad.  I also wanted to be brave so I could take care of things and communicate to Steve since he was at work.  I wanted to be curios so I asked the right questions.   I wanted to be thankful for the talent of the vet who did the surgery and thankful he had the time and could work her in right away.  I wanted to be thankful for the experience of having a little dog like Bella in my life to love.

I hope that this has been helpful and useful to you and the next time that you experience a negative emotion…not an indulgent emotion but a negative emotion, you will know what to do.